The most distant galaxy in the universe is 13.2 billion light-years away and was formed just 600 million years after the Big Bang, it has been revealed.
A team of Caltech researchers that has spent years searching for the earliest objects in the universe has unveiled their latest find.
Researchers say a galaxy called EGS8p7 that is more than 13.2 billion years old, while the universe itself is about 13.8 billion years old.
Immediately after the Big Bang, the universe was a soup of charged particles--electrons and protons--and light (photons). Because these photons were scattered by free electrons, the early universe could not transmit light.
By 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe had cooled enough for free electrons and protons to combine into neutral hydrogen atoms that filled the universe, allowing light to travel through the cosmos.
Then, when the universe was just a half-billion to a billion years old, the first galaxies turned on and reionized the neutral gas.
The universe remains ionized today.
Prior to reionization, however, clouds of neutral hydrogen atoms would have absorbed certain radiation emitted by young, newly forming galaxies, including the so-called Lyman-alpha line, the spectral signature of hot hydrogen gas that has been heated by ultraviolet emission from new stars, and a commonly used indicator of star formation.
Because of this absorption, it should not, in theory, have been possible to observe a Lyman-alpha line from EGS8p7.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...-universe.html
Some of the comments are interesting to contemplate:
Then logically, there are races BILLIONS of years ahead of us. Imagine the technology - well no we can't yet. But consider it a humbling reminder next time you scoff at the notion that UFOs, indeed 'Flying Saucers' are not real. They are. I just hope the appalling evil spread by a certain religion does not motivate them to disinfect the entire rest of the Human Race away from the face of this planet.
and
For complex life you need population 0 or 1 stars (The Sun is pop 1), for simple life population 2 should be fine but at 13.2 billions years old they will be population 3 stars and completely unable to support any life. However the oldest population 1 stars are about 10 billion years old (most are less than 8 billion) and the solar system is about 4.5 billion years old, so there is a huge time period for life to have appeared and disappeared. We really do not know enough to give even a ball park figure on the likelyhood of intelligent aliens evolving as there are too many variables that are nothing more than guess work
